All sorts of stages have been proposed for “becoming a person” or “acquiring moral status”: implantation, development of the primitive streak, brain life, sentience, quickening, viability outside the womb, actual birth, actual birth unless it was an induced abortion, formation of desires, formation of concepts, formation of self-consciousness, valuing your own existence—but these all cancel each other out, and anyway, with the talk of the threshold being desires, or self-consciousness, or conscious concern to stay alive, we are now deep, deep into infanticide territory with Peter Singer and Jeffrey Reiman. These are positions that willy-nilly are incompatible with non-arbitrarily affirming the personhood of adults who are in even temporary unconsciousness. And what is wrong in principle with their positions is that they deny human equality, elevating various subrational animals of their choice above healthy young babies weeks, months, and years after birth, and above the deeply disabled mentally or physically.

The thing about moral status is, if you believe in morality at all, that it is not a matter of choice or grant or convention, but of recognition. If you hear anyone talk about conferring or granting moral status, you know they are deeply confused about what morality and moral status are. The very idea of human rights and status is of someone who matters whether we like it or not, and even when no one is thinking about them; and matters, whether we like it or not, as at bottom an equal, because like us in nature as a substantial kind of being.

UPDATE:Members of Diane Tweedle's family are claiming the report below is false.